Much prior art has focused on identifying network and/or system fault conditions. Additionally, prior art has used topological network maps and diagnostic tools to display network fault conditions. Such tools have been designed to allow less skilled network administrators to conduct support from a network or system management station. Occasionally, network and/or system management systems interface with an exterior system for the documentation of problems and resolutions. Integration is often problematic requiring extensive manipulation and correlation of alarm conditions prior to problem and problem resolution documentation.
Such a traditional approach is inefficient on several levels. The traditional model assumes an administrator is available to actively monitor the network or system management station. In an environment where adequately trained human resources are unavailable, an administrator dedicated to monitoring the network management system is a luxury many technical staffs do not have. A successful system must therefore identify a fault condition and have an established methodology of contacting the appropriate personnel when a fault condition exists.
The current paradigm for network and system management systems is to represent fault information via a topological map. Typically a change in color (or other visual cue) represents a change in the condition of the network or system. This method, as currently applied, is appropriate when a single layer of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) logical hierarchical architecture model can represent the fault condition. For example, a fault condition associated with layer two devices can be adequately represented by a layer two topological map. However, to maintain the current paradigm of representing fault condition topologically, a topology map should present a view of the network consistent with complex multi-layer dependencies. Topological representations of large networks are also problematic. A large network is either squeezed onto a single screen or the operator must zoom in and out of the network to change the view. This common approach ignores known relationships between up and downstream objects in favor of a percentage view of the network, e.g. 100% equals the entire network, 50% equals one-half the network.
Further, adequate documentation and description of a problem or fault conditions and its corresponding resolution is essential but difficult to achieve within the confines of a current network or system management systems. Typically the problem description and problem resolution are documented external to the network or system management system. As a result of using an external system to document problems and their resolution, a dichotomy is created between the machine events in the network management system and the external system which records human intervention. Furthermore, the network management system will typically generate multiple events for a single object, such association often lost when translated to an external system. Reconciling the machine view of the network management system with that of the external system documenting the problem description/problem resolution is quite often difficult and unsuccessful.
Current network management tools depend upon the discovery of network/system devices associated with the network, typically through discovery of devices at layer two of the OSI model. Thereafter the network is actively rediscovered using the tool to maintain a current view of the network or system.
A need exists for a technique to topologically represent complex multi-layer relationships between managed objects including complex dependencies between objects operating at multiple layers of the OSI model.
A need exists for a technique to discover, maintain and document the current state of the network based on known network/system objects and to detect deviations from the known state of the network and report such discovered deviations as faults.